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Have you seen this article ? I like the research article but their provider suggestion is bit expensive for me . I would love to see you review benchmark about the provider suggested here .
https://www.webwhim.co.uk/how-to-select-a-wordpress-hosting-provider/
Hi Anis,
I’ll read the article and the resources linked from it and get back to you.
On a quick glance, it’s interesting that MechanicWeb is actually on the top of my shortlist of providers to test and try! 🙂
Regarding benchmarks and reviews, here’s my thinking:
I value security and stability above performance, and even technical support quality.
That’s why testing a provider takes me over 50 work hours for just the initial testing (first weeks or so).
For that reason, I’m reluctant to test a provider unless I’m considering hosting my website(s) there.
At this moment, I’m using MyW hosting (for years now), and I’ve just started testing MDDHosting.
With a disclaimer that for MDDHosting it’s still very early days (it takes me about 6 months to confirm a provider is really good) – both those providers are a brilliant match for my needs.
However, now that HostMantis is getting sold (I’m not certain what the service will look like after the sale and possible server change), and with MDDHosting not offering DirectAdmin hosting, I’ll be looking for a DirectAdmin reseller provider, just to have a good DirectAdmin hosting alternative (for cPanel, Veerotech was good and I consider it to be a reliable choice).
I occasionally get a proposal to do a test for a fee, but with the time and effort involved, I can’t do it for a low price.
$2,000 or a $40 hourly pay is what I consider to be acceptable – especially since my testing also helps the provider get 1st hand customer tips, advice, and even some basic marketing feedback (like a combination of testing, review and consulting).
Very few providers are willing to pay such a fee, and even fewer are such that I’d consider it worth working with them (I tend to avoid EIG and the likes) – the few sponsored pieces of content I’ve created over the years are clearly marked as such. An additional problem, I believe, is my review policy.
That’s all fine as far as I’m concerned.
I like concentrating on making new content for my websites and my YouTube channel. 🙂
The bottom line is I can’t promise any tests or deadlines.
With all the pros and cons of that choice.
OK, I’ve read the article.
These are my notes, briefly:
1)
They mention Siteground in a similar context to Cloudways, but don’t clearly state whether they mean it only in terms of affiliate commissions and pricing, or in terms of service quality as well.
In my experience, Siteground is a decent hosting provider.
Are there cheaper providers that offer similar quality (stability, security, speed, tech. support) service?
Yes.
But I wouldn’t call Siteground a bad provider.
Haven’t tried Cloudways so can’t make any comments on that.
2)
I agree that CloudLinux and LiteSpeed make a huge positive difference nowadays, especially for WordPress.
3)
They mentioned Brixly in a positive context regarding their hardware speed.
This aligns with my experience with Brixly hosting.
4)
Regarding Cloudways part of the article, before commenting on it, I’ll make 3 disclaimers:
a) This is the opinion on Cloudways from a web-hosting expert with decades of experience who’s opinion I trust (won’t disclose the name and you are free to disregard this as a hear-say):
“Cloudways is a terrible company that markets with an army of shills unfortunately. /BikeGremlin-redacted-part/ I really can’t stand how dishonest they are.”
b) At the same time, one of the great WordPress experts whose knowledge, experience and human qualities I appreciate very much works with Cloudways.
Won’t spill any names here either, so feel free to disregard this too as hear-say.
c) I don’t have a firm opinion because I haven’t used nor tested the service.
Never fit the bill based on my priorities and needs.
So I’m pretty much neutral – in other words, my goal is neither to “defend” nor to “attack” Cloudways, I’ll stick to commenting the stuff stated in the article.
With that out of the way, let’s begin. 🙂
In the article, they raise concerns about the sys. admin team being located in Pakistan.
I already wrote my thoughts about nationalism and racism.
EDIT:
Based on feedback and info I got from the article’s author, the racism comment is not justified.
But it’s fair to say I was commenting on what was written, the way I saw it and understood it.
I have suggested an article edit to clearly show what the real problem is (or remove that part altogether).
In my opinion, it puts a “stain” on an article that obviously took a lot of time and hard work to make (including all the testing and benchmarking).
However, I think it’s worth looking past the author’s apparent prejudice and assessing the provided information.
They go on to explain what a vCPU is (my take on explaining it), and how with non-dedicated VPS you don’t get to use 100% of the bare hardware.
That itself is not Cloudways-exclusive policy.
I’ve discussed resource-sharing here – “Is VPS better and faster than shared hosting?” in the article about WordPress hosting.
I’ve also explained why such policy, if done properly, can be beneficial in the article called “Web hosting server Overselling vs Overloading.”
Are Cloudways overloading?
Maybe, haven’t tested.
But I don’t think that the fact they aren’t selling dedicated vCPU-s with their VPSs is bad in and of itself.
Just took a glance at their website. They don’t state to sell dedicated cores. If a VPS provider doesn’t state it explicitly, it is generally understood (briefly put, could write a whole article on this) that the resources are a fair-share use, not dedicated.
I’ll quote:
“Cloudways hides information about the shared nature of hardware resources.”
Again, I’m not saying that Cloudways doesn’t overload. Haven’t tested it.
But the above-quoted sentence could be applied to practically every non-dedicated VPS provider, including the high-quality, highly renowned Knownhost (affiliate link).
It’s just not fair.
GDPR-related scare is also interesting.
The same could be said for many hosting providers.
Security is important nonetheless, if it’s true they don’t provide good security for what is basically sold as a manged VPS, that is a big problem.
Jim Walker quote:
“Hosting companies will go the extra mile to solve general WordPress-related problems, and most have satisfied customers with many positive online reviews.”
In my experience, this is a rare exception, not a rule.
See my articles about LiteSpeed-related problems, and my page about hostng server and website problems for some real-life examples with various (mostly shared) hosting providers.
5)
LiteSpeed article part
I agree with most stuff written here. LiteSpeed is awesome.
Though, at this moment, they’ve messed something up with Memcached object cache.
They mess up updates every now and then (or some other stack-element’s update messes up compatibility – same result for the users).
The Memcached object cache problem (still not resolved)
6)
Hardware (mostly server CPU) related stuff
Yes, newer CPU-s are faster and usually more stable.
With shared (and VPS providers, as they thoroughly explained 🙂 ) it still boils down to how many users, with what kind of load, you stack on one server.
But fair points nonetheless.
7)
VPS cargo cult part
Brilliant. 🙂
8)
Benchmark tables
No way to confirm.
For what it’s worth, it doesn’t strike me as clearly non-legit, especially based on their Brixly and Siteground results.
As I said from the start – MechanicWeb is on my “to-try” list. 🙂
9)
“Cloud vCPUs are noisy”
“Cloud” is not necessarily faster, or slower than dedicated.
It depends.
Here’s an interesting 2-page WebhostingTalk forum discussion on “cloud” vs “shared” hosting.
10)
Their benchmark methodology
Quite good.
I also like the WordPress Hosting Benchmark tool. 🙂
Though it’s worth noting:
For me, HostMantis showed good real-life performance – looking at Google Analytics data of average page-load speeds for visitors.
That’s why, for me at least, the real-life performance, along with tests that include all the possible caching (even Cloudflare) are of greatest importance.
Because that’s how I run my websites, so I’m always curious to figure out what’s best and fastest for me.
Having said that, additional “bare-metal” testing is not to be disregarded.
They seem to have done a thorough job – kudos.
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Relja Novović